The artist was born on March 20, 1905 in Moscow, Russia. He left the country of his birth for Paris when he was fifteen. In an interview, Refregier reflected on his time in Paris as well as his apprenticeship under the sculptor Vasilief, in which he noted the man as a great influence who conditioned the rest of his life. Refregier recalls that the sculptor was “a man of the Renaissance,” a quality that Refregier admired and put to use in his own career.

At the invitation of an uncle, Refregier moved to New York in the early 1920s. He first found work as a strikebreaker in a little factory, saying in 1964 that, “Of course now I know better.” The young artist soon earned a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he lived and worked odd jobs for four years. After finishing his education, Refregier moved to New York in 1925. He wanted to be a muralist, to create a “big monumental painting” but instead worked for interior decorators, doing copies of Bouchers and Fragonards for seventy-five dollars apiece. Still in New York, Refregier answered an ad for a “modern artist” wanted by a small firm. Through this job, the artist met many of his life-long friends and fellow artists including William de Kooning, Tully Filmus, and Lou Jacobs. Refregier continued his travels and briefly returned to Europe in 1927, studying in Munich under Hans Hofmann, who was an enormous influence on artists participating in abstract expressionism.

By this time, America experienced the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, taking the entire country and, indeed, the rest of the world with it. In his 1964 interview, Refregier said nothing of the early 1930s. Little is known of his career between 1929 and the formation of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. The artist was living in a New York artists’ colony, in Croton-on-Hudson’s Mount Airy section, which was an area known to have housed many artists and noted members of the American Communist Party. Refregier sought the community as a haven from the reaction against American radicalism that had followed World War I.

Refregier stated that mural painting was virtually impossible before 1934 because of the popularity of the cheap interior decorations he had previously produced. He claimed that architects were very reluctant to give artists a wall, but miraculously he had been able to survive as a muralist until the 1936 government sponsorship of the arts. Artists became inspired by what was happening with public art in Mexico (the murals created by Diego Rivera, among others). The WPA fulfilled many of the wishes of these truly starving artists. Refregier, as an artist currently on relief, was eligible to receive $23.86 a week on the WPA rolls. He was given his choice of assignments for his first project: a courthouse or the children’s ward of a hospital. Not wanting to have to deal with making a revolutionary statement through his work on the courthouse, the artist chose to paint for the hospital. In 1964, Refregier remarked that he wished he had taken on the courthouse, while still maintaining that he hadn’t “chickened out.” Refregier was made the leader of a team of five artists who would work on Brooklyn’s Green Point Hospital. Refregier felt embarrassed at the idea of being a master artist for his peers, artists roughly his age whose work he had never even seen, so Refregier proposed they create the mural cooperatively. It took about a year to complete the project, which worked out well, with the different artists contributing to different sections of the wall.

Refregier’s work then mainly constituted of work sponsored by the government: for the World’s Fair Federal Works Buildings in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and then for the Section of Fine Arts of the Public Building Administration inside of the Treasury Department. He worked as a teacher, supervising artist and mural supervisor. Refregier competed and won many mural competitions, earning a formidable reputation as a “big name” in art during this part of the century. He denied ever having stood out among the WPA artists, asserting that “while on WPA we had complete democracy, no name stood out, every man had an equal chance.”

The artist’s most famous mural is the 27-panel work detailing the “History of San Francisco” located at the Rincon Post Office in San Francisco. Refregier won this commission from the Section of Fine Arts in 1940 and completed the work in 1948. This mural was the costliest ($26,000) and most controversial of the Public Works, sparking national debate over the inclusion of controversial events from California’s history. Shortly after the murals’ completion conservative Republican senator Hubert Scudder demanded the work be covered, insisting the work defamed the pioneers and reflected negatively on California’s past. Others, including Richard Nixon, got involved in the protest, but were defeated by a coalition of concerned artists, museum directors, and citizens. The work is still located at the Rincon Post Office and has recently been restored.

After Rincon and the subsequent conflict surrounding it, the artist continued to work, taking jobs as a professor, teacher, and judge for numerous exhibitions. Refregier was married, and had at least one child, a son who was killed in a motorcycle accident. The artist died in 1979 while working on a mural for the Moscow Medical Clinic, the same year his Rincon mural was placed under the protection of the National Registry of Historic Places.